Organized labour, also called trade unionism, association and activities of workers in a trade or industry for the purpose of obtaining or assuring improvements in working conditions through their collective action.

Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand

Origins in Britain

British trade unionism has a long and continuous history. Medieval guilds, which regulated craft production, clearly differed in function from trade unions, in that guilds were combinations of both masters and workers while modern unions emerged to serve workers’ interests alone. However, aspects of guild regulation—as in matters relating to apprenticeship—were incorporated into the objectives of early unionism, so that some continuity may be discerned between the decay of the one form of organization and the emergence of the other. Examples of the trade-union form of organization are hard to trace before the late 17th century; but during the following hundred years, combinations, as they were known to contemporaries, became widespread, emerging among groups of handicraft workers such as tailors, carpenters, and printers. Their emergence at this period was a result of the development of manufacturing and commerce on a capitalist basis. The number of handicraft workers within the economy was expanding, yet for such workers the prospect of making the transition from journeyman to master was diminishing. Both the rising demand for their labour and their emerging status as permanent employees were essential elements in this early development of labour organization. An additional factor, related to the rise of capitalism, was the progressive withdrawal of the state from wage regulation in particular and from labour-market intervention more generally. This was confirmed by the repeal, in 1813 and 1814, of legislation that had provided for the fixing of wages by justices and had stipulated apprenticeship requirements for entry into a trade. The state’s withdrawal from labour-market regulation raised with some urgency the issue of the legality of trade unions. Under the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, a general prohibition had been placed upon them, in addition to the restraints imposed by the common law of conspiracy. Such a general prohibition now appeared anomalous and unjust, and it was indeed removed by legislation in 1824 and 1825. Common law impediments remained.

In the ensuing period, unions multiplied. As in the previous century, they were typically local in scope and craft in composition. Even in the emerging mechanized and factory-based sector, the relatively unsophisticated technology and managerial organization required the employment of skilled tradesmen, and these were assimilated into combinations based on the craft pattern of organization; engineers, boilermakers, and cotton spinners are examples. Yet, at this stage, the structure of unionism was still sufficiently fluid to permit widespread experimentation. During the 1830s there developed a movement toward “general unionism,” directed both at establishing organization nationally and at drawing the various organized trades into alliance with one another. The pioneer in this movement was the cotton spinners’ leader, John Doherty, but much of its impetus derived from Robert Owen, whose ideal of cooperative as against capitalist production found widespread support. The most ambitious Owenite union project was the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1833–34, designed to embrace the whole of labour though in practice focused on London tailors and shoemakers. Inherently unstable, as were the other broad labour formations of the period, this union did not expire without leaving an enduring legacy. Six Dorsetshire agricultural labourers—the Tolpuddle Martyrs—were convicted and sentenced to transportation to Australia for swearing a secret oath in connection with the union. The union mounted a major campaign on their behalf, and this episode is still cherished by the modern labour movement as symbolic of its early struggle.

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Craft unionism in the 19th century

British settlers brought their customs with them to Australia and New Zealand, and, accordingly, early unions there corresponded closely to the pattern of the home country. The penal character of the settlements established in Australia from the late 18th century was hardly conducive to forming workers’ combinations, but the transition from convict to free settlement brought the first signs of union activity. Local societies of craftsmen were operating in the 1830s and ’40s, ostensibly for the purpose of providing friendly benefits for their members but in practice for trade purposes as well. Groups involved in these societies included printers, tailors, building craftsmen, and engineers. With the expansion of the economy from the 1850s, such groups formed the basis for permanent trade unions. The emerging pattern was one of craft unionism, in which Australian unions, like their counterparts in Britain, sought to restrict entry into and regulate working conditions within their respective trades. In Britain, during the middle decades of the century, a number of such unions developed their organization on a national basis. The most famous were the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, constituted in 1851 and 1860, respectively. In Australia the main impetus to the national organization of trades came later, with the federation of the separate colonies in 1901.

In both countries, as unions consolidated their organization on independent and sectional lines, collaboration became a means of securing common legislative objectives rather than concerting industrial activity. This was classically the case with the British Trades Union Congress (TUC), an annual union assembly initiated in 1868 with a view to lobbying the legislature through a standing Parliamentary Committee. The model was followed in Australia, where, beginning in 1879, a number of Intercolonial Trade Union Congresses were held, partly with a view to encouraging the formation of parliamentary committees in each of the self-governing colonies. Such political activity certainly achieved a further clarification of the unions’ legal status. Legislation removing various remaining impediments was passed in Britain in 1871 and 1875; similar measures followed in all the Australian colonies between 1876 and 1902 and in New Zealand in 1878. Though the three societies differed in many respects, their broadly liberal character had, so far, proved accommodating to trade unionism. In Britain especially, unions had themselves contributed to this effect. As highly visible, stable, and professionally administered organizations, the national craft unions of the mid-19th century contrasted with the more secretive and volatile unions of the preceding era.

The late 19th century brought major labour upheavals that decisively influenced the further development of unionism in all three countries. In Britain, a tendency for unionism to expand beyond its narrow craft confines, apparent in the early 1870s, was curtailed during the depression of the mid-1880s. In the business upswing of 1888–92, the formation of new unions of less skilled workers was resumed, this time with the aid of socialist activists. The movement received an enormous stimulus through the victory of London dockers in their great strike of 1889, secured in the last resort by Australian financial support—a gesture from the New World to the Old. However, in 1890 employers in the maritime sector counterattacked against new unions of seamen and dockers, and the new union established in the gas industry also suffered major setbacks. Even certain craft unions experienced stronger resistance from employers, who were alarmed by the injection of a greater militancy into union behaviour at a time when they faced increased foreign competition in their established markets. Following a national lockout in 1897–98, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers was obliged to accept the introduction of new machinery and payment systems on employers’ terms. In both the maritime and engineering industries, employers had asserted their power by combining in national federations. Perhaps most serious of all for the unions, employer reaction spilled over into the courts, where a series of judicial rulings, culminating in the Taff Vale judgment of 1901, undermined the legislation of the 1870s.

A crisis in labour relations was also reached in Australia and New Zealand in 1890. From 1870, the craft character of unionism in those countries had also been modified by the emergence of national industrially based unions in the mining, shipping, and pastoral industries. The most notable examples in Australia were the Miners’ Association and the Shearers’ Union; these extended their organization to New Zealand, where union development closely paralleled that in Australia. Greater scale and militancy in labour organization, clearly apparent by the late 1880s, drew forth a corresponding response from employers, leading to major confrontations in the early 1890s. The first was the great maritime strike of 1890, involving seamen and wharf labourers in both Australia and New Zealand and also extending to shearers and coal miners. These new unions, however, had embarked on a trial of strength with associated employers at a time when the economy had turned against them, boom turning into prolonged depression. In conditions of heavy unemployment, the maritime strike was broken, and there followed further defeats for the shearers in 1891 and 1894 and for the miners in 1892.

Industrial defeats led unions to turn to politics with greater urgency than before. In New Zealand they gave their support to the Liberal Party, which won a historic victory in December 1890. The Liberals’ social and economic reforms that followed attracted attention throughout the developed world, but they also may have delayed the emergence of labour as an independent political force, since the modern Labour Party emerged as late as 1916 and did not form a government for the first time until 1935. In Britain also the break with Liberalism came slowly, but interest in direct labour representation quickened in the 1890s, leading at the turn of the century to a political alliance between unions and moderate socialist groups. The Labour Party so created remained in the shadow of the Liberals until after World War I, but thereafter it developed rapidly to assume office for the first time in 1924. The link between the industrial defeats of the 1890s and direct union involvement in politics was most clearly manifest in Australia. By 1900, Labour parties had emerged in four of the colonies, consisting of affiliated trade unions and electorate branches. The federation of the colonies in the following year led to the formation of a national parliamentary party, and by the end of 1915 Labour governments were in office at the federal level and in five of the six states. Despite differences in timing, the experience of all three countries was remarkably similar, with enhanced union interest in politics from the 1890s leading to the formation of Labour parties and, ultimately, Labour governments. However, the outcomes of such political involvement, in regard to the unions’ situation within the wider society, diverged widely between New Zealand and Australia on the one hand and Britain on the other.

To remedy their industrial weakness, unions in Australasia turned to the state and the law for support, through the installation of systems of compulsory arbitration that would oblige employers to deal with them. It was the Liberal government in New Zealand that enacted the first effective measure. The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1894 was drafted by that government’s most radical member, William Pember Reeves, a socialist among liberals. Addressing the problem of employers’ noncompliance with arbitration decisions, Reeves devised a system in which participation was voluntary for unions but compulsory for employers. A union that chose to register under the act could bring any employer before the Arbitration Court, whose awards had legal force.

Following the New Zealand legislation, compulsory arbitration was introduced in Australia at both the state and federal level. The major landmarks were the Acts of 1900 and 1901 in Western Australia and New South Wales, respectively, and the federal statute of 1904. The new system was not installed without a struggle; employer opposition was strong, and it was overborne only by a combination of political forces that included Liberals and the new Labour parties. The New Zealand experiment also attracted attention in Britain. Within the TUC, support came from weaker, newer unions that had not yet achieved employer recognition and saw compulsory arbitration as a means of enforcing it. The temporary operation of such a system in World War I did indeed have this effect, but at the turn of the century most unions were skeptical. Legally enforced collective agreements would entail closer involvement with the judiciary, and British judges were regarded as incapable of delivering impartial rulings on labour issues. Following the 1901 Taff Vale judgment, union support for the Labour Party developed rapidly, with a view to securing maximum freedom from judicial interference. In the 1906 Trade Disputes Act, British unions secured the legal immunities they desired, and the principle of legal abstention remained fundamental to the conduct of British labour relations to the 1970s.

In a different social setting, Australasian unions believed that compulsory arbitration would work to their advantage, and so it proved. In 1890 there was little to suggest that the propensity to unionize was exceptionally high in these countries, but 20 years later Australia was the most highly unionized country in the world, and union coverage had been greatly extended in New Zealand as well. Apart from a slight drop in the early 1920s, growth in union membership in Australia was virtually unchecked until 1927, the proportion of the work force organized rising from 9 to 47 percent. Compulsory arbitration explicitly recognized and protected unions, and under it even the weakest unions could force employers to have the pay and working conditions of their employees fixed by an arbitration court. This capacity drew in recruits, and in both countries growth was further encouraged by the practice of handing down arbitration awards that conferred preference in employment on union members. In the case of New Zealand, a 1936 amendment to the legislation of 1894 provided for compulsory union membership—a change that led to a dramatic increase in union coverage. In Australia a further crucial development came in 1907, with the Arbitration Court’s judgment in the Harvester case. This ruling held that a living wage was a first charge upon industry, and it set a basic wage for unskilled labour at a level substantially higher than existing rates—an approach to wage determination that unions could certainly live with. Within both countries, however, the degree of dependence of unions upon legal support varied. Unions with a small or scattered membership (and there were many such) were almost wholly dependent; but for larger and more concentrated organizations, a real alternative existed in the shape of direct bargaining and strike action.

In the years immediately before and after World War I, that alternative found increasing support in unions of miners, railway men, and wharf workers, where, as in Britain, the syndicalistideology of direct action had acquired some influence. Syndicalist rejection of parliamentary politics, and hostility to the state in all its forms, was given particular edge in the context of compulsory arbitration. In New Zealand a militant Federation of Labour developed in opposition to the arbitration system, and in 1912–13 a violent confrontation occurred in ports and mining towns, but the strikes were broken by employers (now mobilized in defense of arbitration), farmers, and the government. It was significant that the majority of unions valued their registration under the Arbitration Act too highly to affiliate with the Federation of Labour. In Australia, compulsory arbitration also survived an increased advocacy and practice of strike action. During and after the war the idea of the “One Big Union,” which would unify existing organizations and maximize striking power, gained a certain currency. It seems to have delayed the emergence of an Australian counterpart to the TUC, toward which the intercolonial congresses of the previous century had been moving. Eventually hopes of realizing the grander plan faded, and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) was formed in 1927. Though some of the impetus behind the ACTU’s emergence came from those who saw it as an instrument for the coordination of strike activity, in practice its survival owed much to the function it performed within the federal arbitration system in representing unions in basic wage and other national test cases.

Union expansion under a voluntary system

In Britain the broadening of unionism’s membership base was underpinned by the spread of employer recognition and voluntary collective bargaining procedures, and it was the union leaders’ faith in this process that encouraged them to believe that they could dispense with political and legal support. The engineers’ defeat in 1898 did not lead to a withdrawal of employer recognition, and by this stage collective bargaining had spread beyond the crafts into coal mining and cotton manufacturing. However, unlike the craft, coal, and cotton unions, those of more recent origin still faced an uphill struggle. In the maritime, railway, and gas industries recognition was commonly denied, but the willingness of the new unions to recruit across occupational boundaries contributed to their survival. During the years after 1910 it was the unions constituted on a general or multioccupational basis that grew most rapidly. Of the three largest unions of the second half of the 20th century, two—the Transport and General Workers Union and the General and Municipal Workers Union—were direct descendants of new unions of 1889.

Though union membership growth was a marked feature of the early 20th century in Britain, as in Australasia, its upward course was less steady and more vulnerable to shifts in the economic cycle. In the full-employment years of 1910–20 it was explosive, accompanied by an escalation of industrial militancy in mining, railways, docks, and elsewhere. As in the former colonies, such militancy was tinged with syndicalism. But growth was halted abruptly in 1920, with membership at 45 percent of the work force, and in conditions of heavy unemployment there followed a long decline into the early 1930s. Though unemployment checked growth in the other countries as well, the contraction in British union coverage, to 22.6 percent, was particularly severe. Despite the shrinking membership, industrial conflict took time to abate, as employers’ efforts to force down wages were met with determined resistance. In 1921, with the creation of a General Council, the TUC had equipped itself to coordinate industrial action, and this power was put to the test in 1926 when a general strike was called in support of the Miners Federation. Conflict on this scale inevitably pitted unions against state, and it was this wider aspect of the dispute that in the end caused the TUC, committed as it was to constitutional modes of action, to call the strike off. Government, for its part, having established what it regarded as the boundaries of legitimate action and having confirmed them in legislation in 1927, was not inclined to intervene further to restrict union activity. Nor did employers move to de-recognize unions.

Trade unionism after World War II: An erosion of strength

In conditions of full employment and inflation following World War II, the respective industrial relations systems of both Britain and Australasia came under strain. In the case of compulsory arbitration, unions that had once clung to the system when they were weak now chafed at its restrictions when their strength was recovered. At an early stage there were confrontations involving traditionally militant mining and wharf unions. With the Cold War then at its height, Communist influence within such unions called forth drastic countermeasures by governments, and the 1949 coal strike and 1951 wharf strike, in Australia and New Zealand, respectively, were decisively defeated. As in the past, however, the majority of unions were not drawn into open opposition to arbitration. Nonetheless, though the “adventurist” phase of Communist-inspired militancy was over, more general tendencies toward direct bargaining and strike activity persisted in both countries. Established as an alternative to industrial conflict, compulsory arbitration always faced in practice the problem of how to deal with strikes. A crisis was reached in Australia in the 1960s, when unions were fined for strikes with increasing frequency. The imprisonment of a union official in 1969, in an attempt to recover payment, led to a wave of protest and to the tacit abandonment of penal sanctions. The episode was revealing. It was the system’s flexibility, its capacity to adapt to variations in the balance of industrial power over time and between different industries, that had contained the unions within it. Indeed, flexibility (and complexity) became such marked characteristics of the system that doubt grew as to its continued usefulness. In the 1980s the Australian government commissioned a complete review, yet the Hancock Report that emerged recommended no fundamental modification. Compulsory arbitration had been woven deeply into the fabric of national life in both countries, and in the process unions had been integrated more completely than in other democracies.

In postwar Britain, enhanced union power was widely blamed for inflation and for overmanning and disruption in industry. Between 1945 and 1951, when the Labour Party was in government and the wartime ban on strikes continued, integration between state and unions was unusually close. Government acted to break a series of dock strikes, without general union opposition, in a situation that closely paralleled that in Australasia. Through the 1950s and ’60s, however, unions and government drifted into opposition. The wartime experiment in compulsory arbitration had struck no deep roots and was abandoned, while the return to purely voluntary bargaining was increasingly perceived as damaging in its economic consequences. Under full employment, shop steward organization spread rapidly through industry and was associated with a growing tendency toward unofficial, or “wildcat,” strike activity. The voluntary institutions of British industrial relations appeared to be breaking down, and they were subjected to searching review by a Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations appointed in 1965. The largely voluntary remedies proposed by the commission did not satisfy governments, which were intent on urgent action. In 1969 a Labour government proposed legal restraints on unofficial strikers, enforceable by fines—a development even less welcome to British unions than to those in Australia. The proposals were withdrawn, but the successor Conservative government introduced a new legal code in the Industrial Relations Act of 1971, which included laws on unfair industrial practices and on legally binding agreements. These and various other provisions were to be enforced by a special Industrial Relations Court—in effect reversing the entire British tradition of legal abstention. Even then, unions refused to be contained within the tight legal framework that had been created, and this government was besieged by a renewed industrial militancy that not only rendered its legislation inoperable but also brought it to electoral defeat on the issue of the enforcement of statutory controls on wage bargaining.

In all three countries, profound shifts in the structure of the employed population during the later 20th century eroded the traditional membership base of unions. In following these shifts toward white-collar, female, and service-sector employment, unions endeavoured to match strides with the rapidly changing composition of the work force—just as, earlier in the century, they had broken through the divide separating skilled from unskilled manual labour. However, though their composition was modified profoundly, with greatly increased representation of white-collar and female employees, they could not keep pace. Union coverage of the work force in Britain recovered to its 1920 level in 1948, then surged forward in the 1970s to pass 50 percent for the first time. From a peak in 1979, however, it fell away. Closer integration with the state may have afforded Australasian unions better protection against the adverse consequences of structural change, but this is uncertain. Australian union coverage peaked at 60 percent in 1954; subsequent decline was checked in the early 1970s, but by the late 1980s coverage may have been as low as 42 percent. Higher levels of unemployment from the 1970s reinforced the trend, associated as they were with a rapid contraction of employment in union strongholds in manufacturing, mining, and the docks. In Britain this contraction was accelerated by a series of union defeats, the most drastic of which was inflicted upon the National Union of Mineworkers in the great strike of 1984–85. Legal restrictions on British unions, attempted in the 1970s, were reintroduced in the following decade. But if the political and industrial climate had turned more sharply against British than Australasian unions, the problem of adaptation to change remained a common one.